ZooMed docs are in demand worldwide for their exotic expertise

By University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine By Amy H. Carter

January 5^th, 2025

From Paris to Kyiv, UGA veterinarians travel the globe teaching other clinicians how to care for and conserve exotic and wild species.

Geography, sociology, and ideology may separate nations, but a love of pets is universal, and a thirst for knowing how best to keep those pets healthy is shared by veterinarians of many nations.

That desire to learn has made globe trotters of the veterinarians who staff the Zoological Medicine Service at the University of Georgia’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital. The travel calendar shared by Dr. Stephen Divers and Dr. Joerg Mayer is booked out to April of 2027 with trips abroad to teach fellow practitioners and conservationists around the world how to care for exotic animals.

Dr. Stephen Divers and members of the Chinese School for Advanced Veterinary Studies. (Provided photo)

Dr. Joerg Mayer with fellow veterinary practitioners in India. (Provided photo)

Life and learning go on

Mayer was attending the Veterinary Medical Expo (VMX) in Orlando, Fla., in January of 2024 when a chance encounter with the president of the Ukrainian Small Animal Veterinary Association sparked an invitation abroad. Amid Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia, the association was planning for its national conference in Lviv in western Ukraine the following June. Mayer was invited to lecture about the care of exotics.

“War is going on and life is not normal, but at the same time, they are making a concerted effort to carry on,” Mayer says.

Veterinary medicine in Ukraine and many of the countries Mayer visits is not dissimilar from that in the U.S. Vaccines protect against infectious diseases, wounds are sutured, and illnesses are treated with similar medications and interventional procedures.

But war has forced Ukrainian families to make hard choices, and in the two years since the war started, abandoned family pets have turned feral. Diseases like rabies and distemper are common again. “It’s very surprising how chaos can affect a very organized society very quickly from that point of view,” Mayer says.

Yet veterinarians are still on the job, caring for the animals they can and traveling 12 to 18 hours from the front to stay abreast of the latest developments in veterinary medicine.

Mayer himself experienced a bit of the challenge they face, speaking most days through a fog of sleeplessness due to nightly drone attacks that drove everyone into air raid shelters. The night air hummed with the sound of generators used by restaurants struggling to remain open despite the damaged power grid.

The veterinarians he met were well read but still eager to learn more, Mayer says. “They were very hungry because the population, they love the exotic animals. And so, it wasn’t like a fringy topic.

The diploma presented to Dr. Joerg Mayer by the Ukrainian Small Animal Veterinary Association in honor of his participation in the organization’s 2024 meeting in Lviv, Ukraine. (Provided photo)

“As with any urbanized society there is a large percentage of exotic animals (in Ukraine) because if you live in Kyiv or in any big city on the 16th floor of a high rise, you might not have the possibility to walk your dog properly. You may not want to. But you may want to have a snake. You may want to have a rabbit. You may want to have a parakeet.”

Mayer will be returning to Ukraine in June to attend the Ukrainian Small Animal Veterinary Association’s 2025 Conference in Kyiv, followed by a stint lecturing at the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, as part of the Erasmus+ Program, an exchange program for students and faculty in the European Union.

UGA VetMed has a faculty exchange arrangement with the university in Cluj-Napoca. “Their faculty have been here a couple of times, and then I’ve been there a couple of times. And so we’re going to piggyback probably an Erasmus exchange after my lecturing in Kyiv. I’m going to take the train all the way down to Romania. I’m going to spend a few days in Romania and have an exchange, basically lecture to their students and their faculty there. And then we’ll probably have the Romanian faculty come and visit us.”

Hear Mayer discuss the impact of the war on small animal medicine in Ukraine with WUGA.

As is customary when guest lecturers are invited to speak at professional conferences, the Ukrainian Small Animal Veterinary Association will pay Mayer’s expenses to travel and lecture at their June meeting. If you would like to donate to help the association cover those expenses, you may do so by clicking this link, or scanning the QR code.

ZooMed docs are in demand worldwide for their exotic expertise

April in Paris

The songwriters probably never pondered wild animal endoscopy when they extolled the virtues of April in Paris, but it’s a topic Divers will discuss in his keynote address to the XV Yaboumba International Congress on Exotic, Zoo and Wild Animals Conservation, Medicine and Surgery in Paris in April of 2025.

His skill in exotic and small animal endoscopy is in demand worldwide and teaching it to others has taken him to Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Thailand and Australia, among other places. In June, he’ll be in China working with faculty and exotic practitioners to develop endoscopy techniques for various animals.

That visit will be combined with an online component whereby Divers can lecture virtually and devote his time in country to hands on demonstrations. UGA’s digital learning platform is also the way Divers brings practitioners from around the world to UGA for endoscopy training in a more cost-effective manner. Before the Covid pandemic, CVM would host veterinarians primarily from the U.S. to train in endoscopy at the teaching hospital. “When Covid hit, we couldn’t do that course,” Divers says. So, he put all the lecture material on UGA’s eLearning Commons and expanded the course so that veterinarians around the world could access it online.

Enrollment jumped from 16 people per year to 66, with a waiting list “that fills up faster than a Taylor Swift concert,” Divers says. Whereas in-person classes skewed heavily American with a few attendees from Latin America or Canada, the online course attracts practitioners from Korea, Australia, Denmark and other far-flung locales.

In addition to teaching endoscopy on the road, Divers also lends his expertise to conservationists near and far. He works with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to implant tracking tags in the endangered robust redhorse, a fish native to the rivers of central and south Georgia.

Once thought to be extinct, the fish was rediscovered in Georgia in 1991 and is now the focus of study by the Georgia DNR and Georgia Southern University, as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

In 2023, Divers took a graduate student, a veterinary nurse and a fellow veterinarian from Zoo Atlanta to the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador to perform endoscopic sterilization on non-native tortoises of hybrid genetics. The work was done in partnership with the Galápagos Conservancy and Galápagos National Park in support of their efforts to reestablish native species of tortoises to the various islands that make up the archipelago.

Dr. Stephen Divers with a Galapagos tortoise in Ecuador. (Provided photo)

A two-way street

Inasmuch as Divers and Mayer travel to teach, they also travel to learn.

“That’s what fascinates me about traveling internationally,” Mayer says. “Because every time I go somewhere to lecture, I end up learning probably an equal amount from them.”

Drs. Joerg Mayer, left, and Stephen Divers are the Zoological Medicine Service at the UGA Veterinary Teaching Hospital. Their skills as specialists in the field are in demand worldwide, and the pair divides clinical service and teaching with traveling the

For example, in Japan Mayer learned that hamsters are one of the most popular exotic pets kept by residents there. “Again, it may have something to do with the significant urbanization in that a lot of people live in high rises and they just have room for a little terrarium.”

The Japanese invest as heavily in the health and well-being of their hamsters as Americans do with their dogs and cats, so Japanese veterinarians have learned to specialize to the point of performing surgery on fractured hamster bones.

Divers says he was struck by the abundance of technology in use in Asian nations. “I’d go into a private practitioner’s clinic, and they would have a CT scanner. You wouldn’t find that in anything other than a large specialty practice or in academia here.”

Whether the patient before them is Boom the English bulldog in Athens, Georgia, or Polly the parrot in Rio de Jannero, Brazil, veterinarians the world over understand that this is a treasured family member. “People that bring their exotic pets to us here in the clinic are as bonded to their turtle or their cockatoo or their ferret as you would have any bond with a dog and cat,” Mayer says. And in some cases, that bond is two or even three generations deep.

“The life expectancy of these species is significantly higher than other domesticated pets like dogs and cats. And so sometimes it’s actually the third generation that already takes care of that parrot because grandpa brought it from Brazil or Greece. And he got this turtle because he was in the Navy and snatched this turtle up, so now we have a third generation taking care of Matilda, so yes, the emotional bond runs extremely deep.”

As exotic pets become more popular, veterinarians the world over are coming to realize that from a business point of view, exotic medicine is a good business decision, and the knowledge of experts like Divers and Mayer will continue to be in high demand.

In a spring 2024 survey by the American Veterinary Medical Association, 10.5 million U.S. households reported owning exotic animals. Those include fish, reptiles, birds, small mammals such as gerbils or hamsters, and rabbits.